{"id":636163,"date":"2026-10-20T09:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T09:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/636163\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T09:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T09:52:09","slug":"blackwall-quadruples-valuation-to-2-2b-as-websites-wrangle-an-increasingly-crowded-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/636163\/","title":{"rendered":"Blackwall quadruples valuation to $2.2B as websites wrangle an increasingly crowded internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Estonia-based Blackwall<\/a>, which builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers, said on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. It builds products that helps websites grapple with the skyrocketing volume of bot traffic, especially AI agents.<\/p>\n

The Series C was led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. Blackwall\u2019s executive chairman, Roi Carthy, told TechCrunch this funding round increased the company\u2019s valuation by 4 times since its previous fundraise in 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over the past few years, web infrastructure companies like Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva and Blackwall have found themselves in an increasingly valuable but difficult space: They\u2019re on the frontlines, dealing with DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnet farms, malicious requests, and these days, even swarms of AI agents going rogue<\/a>. But it\u2019s also a chance to make a killing by helping hosting providers and websites deal with all the potentially unwanted traffic.<\/p>\n

Blackwall, however, isn\u2019t interested in competing with the bigwigs in its space. Instead of selling its platform directly to websites, the company uses a \u201cchannel\u201d approach, working with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers to understand their needs, and then handing over a bundle of tools which they can customize. Those providers can then offer Blackwall\u2019s security tools to their own clients under their own branding and retain control of that relationship.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s money in it for both sides. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg told TechCrunch that hosting companies can mix and match security components to build their own solution according to what they want to provide to their end customers, set the prices, and share a cut of the revenue with Blackwall. The company initially gives its customers a free tier showing the traffic and threats hitting their network, but charges for any protection or tools to address the threats.<\/p>\n

In addition to providing services like threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing, Blackwall examines its customers\u2019 web traffic to differentiate actual visitors and legit AI agents from malicious bots, intruders, and disruptive traffic. Rozenberg said the company uses techniques like digital fingerprinting to identify the software sending a request \u2014 for example, Microsoft Office or Codex \u2014 to filter out bots. In addition, the company uses its own AI models at customers\u2019 endpoints to analyze the intent and behavior of the requests coming in to differentiate agents sent by a person for a real request versus a malicious bot.<\/p>\n

In the coming years, Rozenberg sees a big opportunity emerging as AI agents begin interacting and transacting with websites on behalf of their users. This should eventually require systems to manage which agents get access, and on what terms, and how they are authorized to make payments.<\/p>\n

Blackwall isn\u2019t alone in eyeing that opportunity. Cloudflare\u2019s AI Crawl Control<\/a> lets website owners allow or block individual AI crawlers, and there\u2019s also an option to charge them for access. But Rozenberg argues that Blackwall\u2019s advantage lies in letting hosting providers offer such traffic management services themselves instead of handing the customer relationship to another security provider.<\/p>\n

Blackwall plans to use the funding to expand its operations across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and develop more security tooling for hosting, cloud and managed service providers.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Estonia-based Blackwall, which builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers, said on Tuesday that it has raised…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,311868,1017,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-636163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-blackwall","tag-exclusive","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}